2014 FO #1: Luxury OpArt blanket

My first finished object of the year is done!

My Luxury OpArt blanket is done with two weeks to spare before the baby is due. 

 It was pretty ruffled and out of shape when it came off the needles...

..so I blocked it really severely (with Lucy's help, of course). 

I liked knitting this blanket - the pattern's super easy to follow and I like tedious knitting. However, it's became clear as soon as I took out the blocking wires that this is not a blanket that wants to be square - unless it's blocked every time it's washed, it's going to end up bendy and ruffled again. I hope the new parents like unusual blankets and think of this as a design feature, or else I'm not sure the blankie will get much use.

However, have a look at the accessories I made with the leftover wool - cuteness in a teeny tiny package.

More on those tomorrow.

It's been a while...

Hello! I've been a bit absent lately but I have a good excuse - it's been hot. Really really hot. So hot that  I had to ring a client and tell them I'd be delivering their job late because the heat affected my ability to work. So hot that some time on Thursday my body started making sloshing sounds when I walked because I'd been drinking such a lot of water (I started to worry a little bit about my kidneys at that stage, but they were fine). It was so hot that on Friday, I enforced the heat policy on my life and spent the afternoon watching 1970s Robert Redford movies. No one man should be that beautiful! 

But three things that did like the heat were my zucchini plants. These two turned in to …

..this one...

..and these four...

..now look like this.

Given how big the the grown plants are, I suspect that the reason only 50% of these garden ones and none of the potted ones survived is the they need quite a bit of space. Hopefully I'll be eating zucchinis soon (side note: no-one told me that when they first start growing, zucchinis look like teeny tiny green penises. You think that would have come up somewhere, but no.)

Due to the heat I haven't been doing much knitting but I did manage to get to the border on my Luxury OpArt.

I'm doing a three-stitch icord to create what will hopefully be a nice-looking finish. The yellow is much brighter than that - it's just very washed out by the early morning light. The baby's due in nine days, so I'd better get cracking! 

Of course, no catch-up blog post would be complete without Lucy looking at me resentfully for not paying enough attention to her.

Sorry Lucy! I'll be right with you.

WIP Wednesday: End of year edition

Today is the last WIP Wednesday of 2013! I haven't done many of them this year; primarily because since I've been working very slowly on big projects, weekly tracking of my knitting progress would bore even my closest, most interested friends.  

For example, the Luxury OpArt blanket.

It looks pretty much the same as last time. Trust me, it's bigger! It's just not very interesting to look at (although I am loving the knitting. It's so brainless - it's like knitting Valium. Guaranteed to reduce stress levels.)

I had a conversation with my sister yesterday, and she said to me that she is incredibly pleased with the present she has bought with me. This immediately led me to start worrying that the present I have for her is not good enough (why does Christmas have to be so stupidly stressful?), so I pulled out my three-quarter finished Soleus socks.

I'll definitely get it finished before Christmas but I suspect I'm going to run out of black wool before I run out of sock knitting. Urgh!! I refuse to worry about this - if there's not enough black wool, then she'll just have to be happy with the present I got. Gift-giving should not be a competitive sport!!

This final item is not a WIP, but I wanted to show you how adorable my cat is. She does this thing where she locates the point at which sunshine and shade meet and lies as close to the sun as she can get without it actually directly touching her.

Unfortunately, she doesn't understand that the sun is huge ball of fire that is being orbited by an always spinning Earth, so when then shade-sun line inevitably moves, so does she. The poor thing must never get any REM sleep because she has to get up and readjust her position every fifteen minutes or so. It is honestly one of the cutest, stupidest and funniest things I have ever seen.

Till next time :)

Social conventions are stupid

I find December a hard month to get through. Primarily, this is because I am quite introverted and December involves a level of socialisation that I find difficult to cope with. It’s like there’s this unwritten rule that it is absolutely vital to see every single person in you know Before Christmas, as if 25 December is some magical date that, if you haven’t renewed your friendship vows by, they will be declared null and void and your personal relationship will be irrevocably harmed. (As a side note, I feel exactly the same way about hen’s dos. After the wedding, the bride will still live in the same house with the same partner working in the same job as she did before the wedding. The only difference is that after the wedding they will have dropped the equivalent cost of a three-month trip in Europe on a really big party. Ironically, it’s childbirth that really changes the rules of friendships and with pregnancy there’s sadly not the chance for one big last messy night out.)

To be able deal with everything that is required of me in December, in the past I have approached it like a military exercise. I write a list of people I need to see and book them early with dates, places and times. I write a list of people I need to write cards for and have the cards written ready to be posted on 1 December. I write a list of people I need to buy presents for and have the presents ready and wrapped as soon as I can. I do everything in my power to make everything run as smoothly as possible. I am like a well-oiled well-run Christmas machine, making Christmas happen with a precision rarely seen outside a Swiss watch factory or the German railway system. There’s no room for flexibility but I get shit done. 

This leads me to the secondary reason I have trouble with December: it makes people go crazy. I start being involved in hour-long discussions of how to deal with the fact that Auntie Doris doesn’t like turkey but Uncle Mike thinks it’s not Christmas unless there’s a full turkey dinner. A reasonable answer would be to ask each person to bring a dish that they’re happy with eating (and, maybe if Uncle Mike realised what an effort it is to make a moist delicious turkey he wouldn’t be quite so fussy about wanting one every single year) but instead there’s drama that usually involves the person hosting cooking two or three different meals to appease each of the four people attending dinner. People spend too much money on presents and then get upset about the presents they do or don’t receive. They drink too much and have fights with their partner about who agreed to be the designated driver and who just can’t control themselves around an open bottle of sparkling wine. It’s exhausting.

Part of the Christmas preparation for me is the making of Christmas gifts. I’ve embarked on different projects over the years: knitting everyone in my family a pair of socks; knitting just some a pair of socks and, this year, knitting two pairs of socks. But I don’t know if it’s because of the unseasonally cold weather or just general end-of-year tiredness, this year I have less tolerance for the Christmas drama (I don’t care if there’s chicken instead of turkey. I don’t care if you order pizzas! It’s about the company, not the food. And, if you insist on cooking the whole meal yourself and not accepting any offers of help and not allowing anyone else to bring any food, I do not want to hear one single word about being a martyr to the family. Not one.).  In a first since I have started knitting as an adult, this year I have absolutely no desire to knit gifts for anyone else. So, instead of working on the socks I was planning to give away, I have worked on nothing other than this:

Isn't it gorgeous? It's an Op Art knitted in Luxury 8ply in Sunflower and Purple Storm. 

The pattern is super simple - one knitted row followed by one purl row, changing colours as required. Rinse and repeat until the blanket is the desired size or the wool has run out. Stress free, cheerful and soft to the touch, this is exactly the project the doctor ordered. With the aid of this blanket, I might just be able to make it through the month...